Undead for a Day Read Online Free Page A

happy-Yay! Disney version of the story while the rest aren’t so nice. Odds are, Dawn, that you don’t have any kind of happy ending version of your soul stain going on during Samhain.”
    Nothing like a good dose of Geek Kiko to put things into perspective. Even so, she couldn’t stop loving the absence of heaviness in her, couldn’t help but to lean on the balcony railing and smell the brine-laced air and think of how lucky she was to be alive after all the shit she’d gone through in life.
    Maybe, after everything she and the team had endured, something good had finally happened and this had nothing to do with screwed-up magic, like Kiko and Costin thought. Maybe her therapy had kicked in—
    Her ears picked up a sound from down the beach. Somewhere in the night, there was a cry, but these were the final hours of Halloween and the kids were out in full force, so she went back to listening to Kiko.
    “Sure, we wiped out those Undergrounds,” he said. “But our vampires weren’t the only bloodsuckers out there. There’re different lines, and some of them could be into magic. We’d be stupid to dismiss the idea. And we know that there’re hundreds of other supernatural creatures that might be up to all kinds of mischief tonight.”
    She laughed, but then stopped. Dawn’s mother was one of those creatures Kiko was talking about. Eva Claremont had come under the sway of what they thought might be a demon and they hadn’t heard from her since.
    But now that Dawn’s soul stains had gone a little lighter, thoughts of Mommy Not-So-Dearest didn’t get to her as much as they had before. She had spent a long, long time trying to forget about that woman.
    Now it seemed so easy.
    “Besides,” Kiko said, “you know better than anyone that some of the cold cases Natalia and I deal with at the agency have a certain...stench...about them, too.”
    “Not everything is supernatural, Kik.”
    “I’m not saying that every old robbery or lost love case we deal with is otherworldly, but there’re some screwy things we’ve come across, and Natalia shoves those cases right out the door. She doesn’t want a thing to do with them.” He and Natalia were trying to be “normal,” now that they’d gotten married. “What if one of those cases left some magic behind and it had a ricochet effect on us or our friends on Samhain? Magic doesn’t always aim straight, you know.”
    She could hear him moving around on the other end of the line. “You’re overreacting, Kik.”
    “No matter what’s going on, I’m getting right on this.”
    “Natalia’s not going to like it.”
    “Let me worry about that.”
    He hung up without another word. Typical Kiko. He was probably already dialing up this house’s landline so he and Costin could have a conversation.
    She tucked her cell into the pocket of her jeans and kept leaning on the railing. Three, two, one...Yup, there went the phone.
    The waves seemed to get louder, but maybe that was because she was really starting to listen to them. Meanwhile, she thought she felt the dragon’s blood swirling on her right side, restless.
    Screw you , she thought. Did you really think you were going to get another chance at taking over the world?
    She started to leave the balcony to see if Costin had come upon any paranormal news through the supernatural conspiracy chat boards that usually consumed Jonah’s attention.
    But then she sensed, more than heard, something on the beach close by.
    She wasn’t psychic like Kiko or Natalia, and she wasn’t a spirit like Costin, but Underground fights had sharpened her human senses. It was just that she hadn’t used them for a while.
    Turning her ear toward the faint sound she thought she heard— swish, swish , like sand under a set of paws that were coming this way—she leaned over the balcony, straining to hear some more.
    Just as she realized that she did hear something and they sounded a whole damn lot like running steps, she backed away from the